Professional PHP5 Book Review

Programmer to Programmer

Professional PHP5 is the book you should read after reading Wroxs’ Beginning PHP5 book as it the next book recommended in the series. Professional PHP5 is for PHP developers who are already familiar with using PHP code and someone who is looking to program using Object Orientated (OO) code and techniques as well as advanced software architecture concepts.

Professional PHP5 starts with an introduction to Object Orientation by discussing and coding objects, classes and properties. The book then discusses UML (Unified Modelling Language which was designed to be a language of standardised diagrams for modelling software design. The following chapters discuss the GenericObject, Collection and CollectionIterator classes. There is also a great little chapter on the SOAP protocol, including the PHP5 Soap Extension and the SoapClient functions as well as how to make a SOAP server.

Sessions and Authentication is discussed in one chapter which is very important if you are going to build a PHP application which requires you store user data in a session or create a password protected area.

Part IV of the book which is the final 200 pages of the book before the appendices takes you through a test case of a sales force automation project. Having a real world project within a programming book is always a good idea in order for you to work through your newly attained PHP programming knowledge. The project itself takes you through project management methodologies, planning the system, systems architecture, how to assemble the toolkit, quality assurance and deployment of the system.

Appendix A discusses version control, Appendix B discusses PHP programming interfaces such as the Zend Studio, while the following two appendices discuss PHP performance tuning and the best way to install PHP.

This is a good book if you want to learn a lot about object orientated programming with PHP, but I feel it did not have enough diverse topics about some advanced areas of PHP5 that other book have covered like SQLite. The books best areas though are the OO areas and the inclusion of the sales force automation project which makes this book really useful including a real life project, Professional PHP is well laid out and has a good number of diagrams and code snippets and scripts within the book as well as a good number of object examples that you can use in your own projects.